This was a great, page-turning mystery. It reminded me a lot of "The Girl on the Train" and "Gone Girl" but with more likable characters. I found myself not wanting to put it down because I wanted to find out whether the mother was really missing or dead. It might have been a bit predictable in spots, but it was a great read overall.

"Watch Me Disappear" by Janelle Brown is an intriguing story about the aftermath of a tragedy that envelopes a family. Billie Flannagan is a wife and mother who goes on a solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in Desolation Wilderness and inexplicably disappears. One of her hiking boots is discovered in a riverbed and she is presumed dead after a exhaustive nine day search for her comes up empty. In the wake of this catastrophe, Billie's husband and daughter must try to make sense of this tragedy and move on with their lives.

The story takes place a year after Billie's disappearance. Jonathan, Billie's husband, is plagued by questions rgarding how is wife actually died in the wilderness. Initially, he clung to the misguided hope that she would miraculously turn up. There is no closure because there was no body to bury thus he is left with an emotional and legal nightmare to untangle. He quits his job and starts a memoir about his life with Billie.

Billie's daughter, Olive, attends Claremont Prep school and floats through each day in a state of despair. She has recurrent dreams and visions of her mother and believes she is trying to reach out to her. She is convinced that Billie is still alive. She gets her father to promise to investigate her mom's disappearance.

As Jonathan goes through Billie's personal effects, he starts to piece together facets of her life that he did not know about. He then questions how well he really knew her. This is a compelling story that shows how tragedy can uproot a family. I couldn't put the book down because I was intrigued about Billie's disappearance. What actually happened to Billie? You'll have to read the book to find out.

My thanks to NetGalley, Janelle Brown and Random House for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The story moved too slowly for me and lacked excitement. A mother/wife disappears while hiking and a year later her husband/daughter try to find out what happened to her.

Janelle Brown has written a very readable, fast paced novel entitled "Watch Me Disappear". Filled with twists and turns that keep the reader intrigued from the first page to the final sentence. Don't read this book if you're crunched for time. You won't want to put it down. Would be a great summer beach read.
Ms. Brown has given us a host of flawed, but interesting, characters. You will find yourself changing your opinion on each of them many times during the course of this novel.

A nice family, Jonathan, Sybilla and Olive. Jonathan is a writer, Sybilla loves to hike and Olive is still in high school. Then one day when Sybilla, or Billie, as she is called, goes out for a hike she doesn't return. A search party only finds a hiking boot in the remote area. She is presumed dead and the husband and daughter try to cope best they can. Olive is still trying to find herself and Jonathan seems to have writer's block. Olive starts to have hallucinations and thinks she sees her mother. She is convinced that she is not dead. Jonathan tries to convince Olive that she is wrong, but during his attempts to prove her wrong, he starts to uncover some things he did not know about his wife. It seems one thing leads to another and the more he finds out, the more questions he has. This mystery novel does keep you guessing and flows quite smoothly. I would have given it 5 stars, but the writing seemed to be more suited for a Young Adult. I do thank the publisher and author for giving me an advance copy for my honest review.

A very unusual story that keeps you guessing. The characters seem real and the relationships are very complex as is life.

I loved this book! It kept me guessing, then made me think I had it all figured out, then totally surprised me! I got sucked in to the character study of both Billie and Jonathan and the inner workings of their marraige. This was really well written and while some of it was a little far fetched, it was fully entertaining which is just what I was looking for on vacation. An enthralling escape!

Very suspenseful novel. The characters were very well developed, and my opinion of the outcome kept changing every few chapters.

A mother with a troubled past vanishes while hiking, leaving her family to piece together her secrets, in this keenly observed novel from the bestselling author of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

Billie Flannigan has been missing for almost a year after she left to go hiking. No body has ever been found and as the one year anniversary is coming up, Jonathan and Olive are doing the best they can do get through their pain.

Olive begins having visions of her mother begging her to come and find her. Jonathan is stuck trying to begin a book about their life together, but the bottle and memories get in the way.

I liked the premise of the book. A woman disappears, assumed dead and normally that would be that. But Olive isn't going to let it go. As she and her father dig into Billie's past they find more questions than answers.

Did anyone really know who Billie was/is? The pace was a little slow for me in spots. I didn't feel like I had a handle on any of the characters. Everyone was just giving their version of who this woman was in their eyes. The idea of this woman who kept reinventing herself is very intriguing.

Unfortunately I thought the characters needed a lot more authenticity. I would give her writing another read however because she is a good writer.

Thank you Netgalley and Penguin Random House!

A mother with a complex past and complicated secrets disappears on a solo hike...one year later, her husband and daughter are coming to terms with her almost certain death...but is she really dead?
This premise sounds like yet another venture into a family drama slash psychological thriller, but it pleasantly surprises by weaving in richer themes of loss, adolescence, love that is true but but flawless, of parents and children and spouses. As Billie's death is questioned by husband Jonathan and daughter Olive, their relationships with Billie, along with their own personal journey with grief, are laid bare.

I enjoyed the characterization, plot, and general momentum of this story. The "is she alive" bit drew me in, but the relationships in the story is what holds interest and elevates this book.

Watch Me Disappear is one of the most thought provoking and entertaining books I have read in a while.

Well developed, complex characters that you grow emotionally attached to through the story

The story is magnetic ... drawing you in ...
We often wonder how we will be perceived when we pass away. What little secrets will come to life when we aren't there to tell the story from our perspective. Do we have the courage to live a life we choose instead of the box we keep climbing into every day? This story shines a light on the dark corners we hide from the world. We are able to explore the fantasy of truly living our own life and being free to explore and independantly choose our path.

Janelle was masterful in creating deep believable characters ... it is easy to relate and fantasize about being them ... breaking through our own walls of boredom and routine that we created.

This one is worth reading at least once. Great epilogue, Masterful story telling, Deep characters, and a story that will be hard to forget.

What an amazing thought provoking mystery about the disappearance of a mother and wife!! This book takes you through the life span of a young free spirited ecoterrorist with huge dreams to change the world. Due to a very strict religious life with a Pastor as a father, she eventually runs away, only to become involved with a drug dealer in LA. Her name is Sybilla or later known as "Sparrow" and finally "Billie." Knowing that this person could be very dangerous, she eventually separates herself from Sydney and later becomes involved with Johnathan. She thinks she has finally found her safe harbor to begin her new life. The family unit is made of up Johnathan Flanagan, Billie's journalistic husband, and her young daughter Olive. Everyone thinks that Billie is such a super spirited super Berkeley Mom, and that she's very happy with her life, but things start to unravel for her. She begins to go on hiking trips with a female friend and is gone many weekends. Johnathan can feel her pulling away and her own daughter is having issues with her. On one if these hiking trips, Billie never returns. There is a smashed cellphone and one hiking boot that is recovered, but no body has ever been found. There is a memorial service conducted, but the family flounders for a year before Billie can be declared legally dead. In the process Johnathan begins writing a memoir about his dead wife. Bills are piling up, and he's trying to be a father and mother to his teenage daughter. Olive is having such a difficult time in the private school she attends, and her life seems to be unraveling as well. He starts finding all kinds of clues in his wife's laptop that are very baffling. He thought he knew everything about his wife, but there seems to be so much more he didn't know. So many questions and no answers. Is she really dead or did she just walk out on the family? What will Johnathan find from the clues? Will he ever be able to finish his book? Will Olive be able to wade through life without her mother? What a great and enthralling book about life and the twists it throws you! The characters were so real and raw with their feelings that the reader could definitely relate to their turmoil. The plot was very well throughout and really kept the reader on its toes. The book kept me reading and guessing until the very end and what an ending! Definitely not what I expected. I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to reading more from this author.

Just when you think you have it figured out the story takes another twist. Would a mother really just up and walk away from her family and how would they handle that truth. Unsettling.

I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an impartial review.

Billie Flanagan - wife, mother, and solo long-distance hiker - is gone. Nearly a year after her disappearance on the Pacific Crest Trail, readers see the devastation of her family. A lengthy search of the trail turns up few clues. Without a body, Billie's family is in a kind of a limbo, financially and legally caught between two worlds.

Husband Jonathan, once a busy tech writer, quits his job to write a memoir of the love of his life. The memoir should be a chance to process his grief but it turns into a diary of questions and second guesses. Daughter Olive, a young teen and only child, finds she no longer really fits in anywhere. School and friends become secondary as Olive begins to have visions of her mother wondering why Olive isn't looking for her. Olive's visions propel the story forward, but they were a rather distracting device.

Billie's past is secretive and enigmatic. Her few stories about her history include religiously fanatic parents and a former drug dealer boyfriend. She had run away from her past and all that appeared to matter was her present with Jonathan and Olive. Now that she has disappeared, Jonathan realizes how little he actually knew his wife.

Brown effectively establishes the character of Billie without the use of Billie as narrator. Everything is seen through others' eyes which adds to the mystery of Billie. Presumed dead, many authors would present someone like Billie as a sweet and gentle victim, gone too soon; Brown allows her to appear selfish, forcing readers (and her family) to question the veracity of memory and family.

This was a very complicated story of a teen whose mother disappears after going hiking. After a thorough search, no trace of her is found, and she and her father are on the verge of giving up when Olive begins to have visions of her mother inviting her to come and find her. It was a well-told story of how little we know our loved ones, those we are closest to, and how much one may find out when searching for them. Is she dead, are these unbelievable stories they are hearing about her true, and did she just leave them for someone else? It's a heart-rending mystery that presses you to find out what will be revealed next and all along the way. I was totally enthralled from the first vision until the end, and still, questions linger and beg to be answered. I loved it. I wonder if another novel will follow this one.

The story of a father and daughter learning to accept and live with the disappearance of their mom/wife. Seemed a bit slow at times, but I felt that fit the story and gave me time to digest, question and think how I would feel, what I would think and how I might respond in the same situation. Enjoyed it.

A great suspense/mystery. A real page turner. We follow Olive and her dad Jonathon. It has been a year since mom Billie disappeared in a hike and assumed dead. Now, Olive begins having visions of her mom while Jonathon uncovers information that suggests Billie isn't who she seemed. What was she doing in the year or two before her disappearance and is she really gone? These questions will keep you hooked until the very end.

This novel did not work for me. It had some real potential, but it felt far too dissipated - like it was trying to drive in so many different directions at once that it went nowhere - and it took its sweet time doing it, too! I had to give up reading it about eighty percent in because it had become such a chore to read. It was far too dismal and never even seemed like it was interested in going anywhere. In the end I really didn't care what had happened to the mother and wife of this family. I really didn't.

The novel starts at almost a year from the point where "Billie" Flanagan went hiking and was never seen again - unless you count one lone hiking boot as a sighting. Her daughter, Olive and her husband, Jonathan, are barely holding it together. Olive starts seeing visions of her mother and after the first of these is so convinced her mom is right there, that she runs into a wall trying to get to her, and all but knocks herself out. I started pretty quickly hoping she would do it again and end up in a coma so I didn't have to deal with her any more.

Jonathan was no better. He never saw his daughter when mom was alive because he worked all hours. This begs the question as to who was raising Olive since mom was evidently always gone as well. Once mom was gone for good, Jonathan quit his job to spend time with Olive, but then he had no money, so they were living hand to mouth.

He got an advance to write a memoir of Billie, but we were never given a single reason why anyone would want to read it or why any publishing company would be remotely interested in a memoir about a woman who was very effectively a non-entity. The advance has been spent, and there's no prospect of more until the memoir is finished, but he's never depicted as actually working on it. In short, he's a truly lousy dad.

The story chapters are interspersed with "excerpts" from this memoir, but I have zero interest in story-halting flashbacks, because well, they halt the story, so I read none of the excerpts. I can't say I ever felt like I needed to go back and read them, which begs the obvious question as to why they were even there in the first place.

Olive's visions were so unrevealing of anything of value that the point of them was a mystery to me. They were all so vague and useless that they became simply annoying in short order. Any sympathy I had for her over her lousy parents was quickly smothered by her endless needy self-importance and habit of constantly and tediously regurgitating her situation for everyone and anyone who would listen.

There's talk that she might have a brain lesion which could explain the visions; then there's talk that maybe that's not the case; then there's talk that the pills she's given are stopping the visions, so maybe they were caused by the lesion, but one of these visions came before she hit her head. Seriously? Which is it? It was never explained and I couldn't stand to keep reading this stuff in the hope that maybe some straight-talk would come out of this story in the last twenty percent when there's been zero evidence of it in the first eighty!

I honestly did not care about any of these people at all, and I really could not have cared less about what had happened to Billie. The blurb (and I know this isn't on the writer, but the publisher) says of Billie that she's "a beautiful, charismatic Berkeley mom" and I have to ask yet again, what the fuck her 'beauty' has to do with anything? Would it have been somehow less of a tragedy had she been plain or even ugly? Would this family's loss have been easier? "Yeah, mom's vanished without a trace, but she was an ugly bitch, so who cares? Let's move on!" No, I don't think so.

Seriously, I am so tired of women being reduced to 'a pretty skin', like they haven't a damned thing to offer other than their beauty or lack of it. That sexist blurb writer should be fired for that blurb. If the novel had been about a man who disappeared, would the blurb have harped on how handsome he was? No! You're damned right it wouldn't. 2017 and we're still mired in this swamp: that a woman better equal beauty or she equals nothing.

I left this observation until last because it has nothing to do with my judgment of this novel. Normally, I pay little attention to the covers because they have nothing to do with the writer, unless the writer self-publishes. It's what's between those covers which interests me, yet you can't ignore the blurb because this is our lead-in to whether a particular novel might be of interest.

That said, I also have to bring the writer to book on this same score, because she also reduces women - particularly Billie - to skin-depth on far too many occasions:
"Billie was beautiful..."
"...Billie's mother would have been beautiful too..."
...her mom was the most beautiful, most creative, the most interesting..." - note how beauty is listed first since it's quite evidently the most important thing about her!
"...being beautiful and strong..." - being a beautiful woman is more important than being a strong woman!
"...being married to a beautiful woman is that other people are going to notice that she is beautiful..."
"And while Billie was more beautiful..."
"You're a beautiful woman."
"...His beautiful wife.."
"...Olive's beautiful mother..."
"Billie, tanned, glowing, and beautiful..."
"This beautiful girl from nowhere..."
So maybe the blurb writer took their cue from the interior after all? Not that they shouldn't have known better. What's just as bad though, is that Olive is compared with this ridiculous standard, and negatively so: "...she's not beautiful, like her mother...", and "She is not conventionally beautiful...." This is sick. I'm sorry, but it is.
If the novel had been about runway models or women competing for a role in a movie or a TV show, then I could see how beauty would play into it. It would still be wrong, but it's the way Hollywood is; however, that doesn't mean that writers have to buy into it so readily. It's diseased writing to keep harping on this for page after page. It's a form of abuse. People who do this have no idea how much damage they do to women the world over by repeating this insane mantra that all that's important is looks, and if you ain't got 'em you ain't got nothin' worth having. Bullshit.

This novel ought really to be condemned on that alone, but sick as this world is, negatively reviewing a book for that would fall on deaf ears. As it was, this novel condemned itself in too many other ways.

Amazing story. Just when you think you have a handle on things, the book shows you how wrong you can be. The characters feel very real, especially Olive. Janelle Brown managed to capture the spirit of a 16 year old girl and put it on paper. I will be putting this book in the hands of everyone I know.

I received an advance copy of this book via Netgalley. And once again, I really should know by now not to pick up a new book so close to bedtime.......

A middle-aged Berkeley (California) wife and mother is missing after a solo hike in the mountains. No body was ever found, only her smashed cell phone and a single hiking boot, and she is thus presumed dead. As her husband and teenage daughter try to rebuild their lives and cope with their devastating loss, the daughter starts to have waking dreams/visions/hallucinations of her mother, leading her to hope that somehow, somewhere, her mother is still alive and wants to be found.

This is a complex story with many twists and turns, surprises and unexpected directions. To say much more than this would involve spoilers, and I don't want to do that. Suffice it to say I can highly recommend this book for those who like twisty plots. You won't be disappointed.